The Hybrid Fleet Concept: Taking a Hard Look at the Way Ahead

I read the critique of the UK’s Hybrid Navy concept when it was published, and I want to push back on part of it while agreeing with another part entirely.

Having spent much of my early career navigating the North Atlantic, I agree that the comparison drawn between GIUK-Gap defence and Ukrainian Black Sea operations is weak at best. The two theatres do not map onto each other cleanly, and building a critique on that comparison undersells what the Hybrid Fleet concept could actually become. If the concept genuinely embraces C4I, AI, logistics, maintenance, and industrial surge as integral components, not afterthoughts, it is a much closer fit to the wider vision of capital-ship reimagining than the critique allows.

Where I fully agree with the critics is on origins. The Hybrid concept was born out of budget scrutiny, and in that sense it is an attempt to make a virtue out of necessity. But that is not a flaw unique to the UK. It will be the driver for most navies going forward, because building the required mass the traditional way in personnel and in cost is becoming unaffordable for nearly everyone.

The Propulsion Problem

I do not believe a fleet can sustain weeks or months-long operations in the North Atlantic with Large Unmanned Surface Vessels (LUSVs) if those vessels carry complicated propulsion and electronics. The environment is too punishing and the maintenance burden too high.

Diesel-electric propulsion built around ISO-containerized, modular gensets is the more realistic path. If a vessel needs eight gensets to run propulsion and systems at peak load, install sixteen. That redundancy is not a luxury. It is the only way to keep a fleet of unmanned platforms operational far from a maintenance yard.

Electronics are the harder problem. My answer is a mobile repair capability, a team that can be helicopter- or boat-lifted out to LUSVs at sea to swap components and carry out routine maintenance. Sustainment cannot simply be pushed back to port. It has to travel with the fleet.

The Real Risk: Cost Creep

The biggest challenge facing any hybrid or mesh fleet concept is not propulsion or electronics. It is cost discipline. If LUSVs are not kept cheap, they will quietly become “capital assets” themselves, and the entire rationale for distributing risk across a larger number of expendable platforms collapses. This is where I think the UK Hybrid concept is most exposed.

Avoiding that trap takes two things. First, an industrial approach to series production of the float-and-move hull itself, rather than one-off or small-batch builds. Second, modular, plug-and-play sensor and effector packages priced accordingly, including a jamming-resistant mesh-network system, which cannot be treated as an add-on.

What Should an LUSV Cost?

This is the question that matters most, and it is rarely asked directly. If an LUSV costs anywhere near what a frigate or destroyer costs or even half that it is no longer expendable, and the whole logic of the mesh fleet breaks down.

My own view is that the target should be roughly 10 percent of the cost of an average frigate, fully loaded. Get there, and a nation should be able to surge its industrial base to produce a complete, operational LUSV roughly every two weeks if the need arises.

Ukraine is instructive here. Ukrainian industry has built genuine synergy with its defence establishment, producing deep-strike missiles at a fraction of the cost the major OEMs charge for comparable capability. That is the model not the pace of a legacy defence-industrial process grafted onto a new platform type.

A Different Way to Tender

Getting to that cost point may require a different procurement instrument altogether: fixed price, fixed capability, and fixed production design, tendered to industry as a package rather than negotiated feature by feature.

It is worth remembering the Apollo 13 challenge as a model for this kind of constraint-driven engineering: the requirement was not “build the best possible solution”. It was “the module must run on this much power; make it work.” That same discipline, applied to LUSV design and production, is what will determine whether the hybrid fleet concept succeeds or simply becomes an expensive detour.

These are just some reflections but I think they matter for how the debate over the UK’s Hybrid Navy concept, and hybrid fleet concepts more broadly, should proceed from here.

Nils Wang is a retired Rear Admiral of the Royal Danish Navy and a Senior Naval Advisor.

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